Although the author’s meticulous reconstruction of the case sometimes leads to repetition, she succeeds in conveying the...
A sordid murder reveals beliefs about race, sex, and justice in post–Civil War Philadelphia.
Historian Gross (African and African Diaspora Studies/Univ. of Texas; Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910, 2006) draws on police and prison records, witness testimony, newspapers, and other archival sources to produce a thorough, absorbing examination of the crime, its context, and the two people tried. The discovery of a dismembered torso in a pond near Philadelphia set off an investigation that eventually led to Hannah Mary Tabbs, a 32-year-old married black woman, and 18-year-old George Wilson, “somewhat simple, or ‘weak-minded,’ ” whom Tabbs blamed for the killing and dismemberment. Unfortunately for Wilson, he was of mixed race, light-skinned enough to be taken for white. “Whereas crime reports typically invoked whiteness to indicate innocence,” writes the author, “with victims often described as lighter than assailants, for Wilson it stirred doubt and an undercurrent of hostility.” Mixed-race individuals “upended notions of whiteness as distinct and supreme” and incited whites’ fears that blacks could circulate undetected or even that whites could mysteriously and horrifyingly turn black. Gross focuses intensely on Tabbs, a woman with a history of violence. Yet because of “her browner skin, pronounced southern drawl, and deferential manner in court,” she seemed less threatening than Wilson. The author argues that Tabbs “understood that northern whites wanted to be reassured about the boundaries of whiteness and black subordination to it” and “manipulated the criminal justice system exceedingly well.” Gross’ insistence that Tabbs “possessed extraordinary physical and intellectual abilities” and “critical skills,” however, is not completely persuasive. Just as likely, she was a sociopath—duplicitous, brutal, and incapable of empathy.
Although the author’s meticulous reconstruction of the case sometimes leads to repetition, she succeeds in conveying the unsettled world in which it occurred.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-024121-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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